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Four or five years ago, if you didn’t go to the big Spring-Ford-Perkiomen Valley rivalry football game on a Friday night, you’d have to wait till Saturday to find out in that morning’s Mercury who won the game.

“When I went to school, somebody would have to go to the Spring-Ford-Perk Valley game and call somebody else,” said Pottsgrove School District Network Engineer/webmaster Jason Grubbs, a Phoenixville Area High School alumnus.

Within even just the last two years, that experience has changed.

“It’s complete interactivity,” Grubbs said.

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Social media, especially Twitter, has made it possible for fans at the game, or even those sitting at home, to see not only the play in front of them but also check how PAC-10 threat Pottsgrove is doing in their game.

“As soon as I get home, I throw up Twitter and I start searching for the hashtag,” Grubbs said. “Literally, it’s like, ‘(Michael) Fowler, 25 yard run.’ I almost know what down it is.”

Lexis Shimkonis, a senior basketball player for Owen J. Roberts High School, said it’s exciting to see herself and her team in such tweets but mostly she likes following her competition.

“I often find it more exciting to see real time results from other games, especially close games and playoff games,” she said. “Updates can be tweeted as they happen in a game, almost like you are there.”

Twitter has changed the media habits in sports reporting, too. “In the old days, you had to call another paper and hope the beat guy was working,” said Mercury sports reporter Darryl Grumling. “Now, all you do is log on to the paper’s website or do a Google search and more often than not, you can easily find the info you are looking for.”

Grumling served as The Mercury’s main football writer this past season and has covered the game, among many other sports, for years.

He’s definitely seen a change in the way the game is followed and what his responsibilities are in light of that.

“Five years ago, when I was covering, say, a Wilson football game, I’d write a gamer or sidebar,” he said. “It would go on my paper’s website at 1 a.m. the next day, when everything was ‘dumped’ online and be in the next day’s print edition.

“Now, I will live tweet, send a photo or two and do a Tout video virtually from the time I arrive at the game, tweet scoring updates and highlights during the game – in addition to the old-school statkeeping, doing play-by-play and otherwise ‘covering the game’ – and my story will be online as soon as it is written/edited and tweeted out,” Grumling said.

“It’s a juggling act,” said Mercury Sports Editor Austin Hertzog.

Twitter drives demand for live coverage

The live coverage doesn’t stop at football. Virtually every high school sport gets the full treatment at some point, whether it was Spring-Ford’s girls’ heartbreaking overtime championship loss, from which Hertzog tweeted every attack, to sports reporter Sam Stewart’s coverage of Perkiomen Valley’s field hockey games.

Shimkonis said she follows on Twitter Mercury Sports, PAC-10 Sports, teammates, the coaches, who run the official team accounts, and her school’s student section, The Cat Pack (@OJRCatPack).

The Mercury’s “live” sports coverage began in 2012 with a Blogspot site called “Mercury Sports Live,” created primarily to provide links for editors to Tweet out during games.

Reporters took short videos with smart phones from the sidelines, sent them via email to an editor, who posted them on Mercury Sports Live, then Tweeted out the video from @PottsMercsports, the sports department’s Twitter account.

Moving forward, the innovation of instant video posting such as Vine and, eventually, Tout, made Mercury Sports Live and sites like it quickly obsolete. Reporters at the field could take a video and immediately put it up via Tout.

That’s how someone like Grubbs could see Fowler gaining 25 yards just a minute after it happened.

“I have gotten several thank you tweets from folks who couldn’t be at the game who are grateful for the live-tweeting/video/etc.,” Grumling said.

Many schools or teams have accounts that also tweet out scores, results or the minutiae of a high school sports event.

“We started the account because I saw a couple of other school districts had athletic Twitter accounts,” Grubbs said, who moderates the official Pottsgrove School District account as well as the athletic department account.

He said he started tweeting out schedule updates, rain delays and snow days, but “it just kind of ballooned into other things we could do.”

At the start, his target audience was parents.

“Then it completely changed,” he said.

Once athletes and other students got accounts and began following, Grubbs started retweeting media coverage and students’ accounts.

“Leave it to the kids to become more interactive,” he said.

Many schools, like Owen J. Roberts High School, Spring-Ford Area High School and Pope John Paul II High School, have Twitter accounts attached to specific sports.

Spring-Ford’s football account makes some basic announcements such as workout times, but also expands to notify “bigger things,” like a “contract to open up with State College (High School) next year as our first game,” said Spring-Ford head football coach Chad Brubaker.

“We are able to communicate with a broad audience about things that are happening within our program,” he said.

Spring-Ford also launched an app last year for smart phones that allows subscribers to get notifications about specific teams, like football.

Pottsgrove High School Athletic Director Gary DeRenzo said social media accounts can be a “great tool” and that some of his sports teams use closed Facebook group pages to set up communication between coaches, students and parents.

Students take the lead

Some Twitter accounts linked with schools aren’t even in the hands of administrators or teachers.

A few popular student-run accounts include the Pottsgrove Student Section (@PG_Student_Sect)and the Cat Pack.

“The OJR Cat Pack, new to Twitter this school year, is great to get updates from every sporting event that OJR plays in,” Shimkonis said. “The students who run the Cat Pack Twitter do a great job getting scores and big plays out to their followers so that even if you are not able to attend a game and cheer in the student section, you are able to keep up with the game and know how our teams are doing.”

Leading up to games, the accounts tweet out the times of games and instructions of what to wear (i.e. a white-out, black-out, etc.) as well as retweeting other students’ excitement.

The accounts are even active during games, ringing out in jubilation or consternation at the goings-on.

Shimkonis said she believes her student section is the best in the PAC-10 and how connected they are on Twitter plays into her views.

In the Owen J. Roberts football game against Phoenixville this year, everything came down to a final Hail Mary pass. If the Wildcats caught the ball in the end zone, they won. If not, they lost.

Wide receiver Kirk Hinrichs did catch the ball as time expired; however, the referee ruled Hinrichs landed with a foot out of bounds.

Almost immediately, the tweet of a student in the Owen J. Roberts student section was retweeted by the Cat Pack. It featured a picture of Hinrichs at the point of his landing, proclaiming him in.

“They’re Zapruder-ing this,” Mercury news editor Steve Moore said.

In response, The Mercury reporter covering a game who had the sideline angle on a Tout video of the same catch sent out a tweet to compare.

“I think we’ve done well in gaining the interest of the next generation of readers with social media,” Hertzog said.

Hertzog said such direct interaction with students and student-athletes is “outstanding.”

“I would say being on Twitter has definitely raised my profile among the area local sports following, especially with scholastic athletes,” Grumling said. “More often than not, when I covered a football game this fall, I could hear kids yelling my name (or Twitter handle) from the stands.”

Stewart, the newest Mercury reporter in the sports department, related hearing his name chanted by the Cat Pack as he covered an Owen J. Roberts soccer game only months after he began working and attributed it to his Twitter presence.

The interaction proves useful. One Friday night during football season a year ago, Grumling realized in his post-game stat tallying that he missed who recovered a fumble on one particular play.

With the newspaper print deadline ticking closer, he asked via Twitter for help.

Within minutes, one football player in the game replied with the player’s name to fill the question mark in Grumling’s stat book.

“I like the way that social media makes it person-to-person and tangible, rather than ‘the newspaper’ to person,” Hertzog said.

Shimkonis said she believes Twitter “gives students a chance to network about what they are interested in and it gets athletes more involved around the league.”

Twitter can also be used as a tool by some athletes to keep tabs on their competition.

“It definitely keeps things competitive,” said Kyle Dix, a sprint swimmer for Perkiomen Valley. “The more you know, the better it is going into the meet.”

Dix said he’ll use Twitter to check results of other teams in the area to get geared up for meets.

“Usually a couple of days after a meet, I find the results,” he said. “We can basically scout out and prepare.”

Bringing students together

Perkiomen Valley’s swimming program doesn’t have an official Twitter account, but Dix said he’s interested in maybe getting one going. His club team in Upper Dublin has one.

Describing the swimming community as “close,” Dix said everyone basically knows each other by the time they hit high school and he uses Twitter to interact with everyone.

“As a whole, it brings student-athletes together because they are able to root for or against a team, see how their competition is doing and get updates and articles that are about what they do on a daily basis,” Shimkonis said.

Although such direct access is usually a plus, there are some drawbacks. After a hard-fought loss against rival Spring-Ford early in the football season, Perkiomen Valley’s quarterback/safety Rasaan Stewart’s profile drew barbed tweets about some miscues in his performance in a game he otherwise played well.

Shimkonis said she hasn’t seen much ill will directed toward her team but has seen some generally directed at her school in other sports or at the Cat Pack.

Dix said that since swimmers know each other so well, any problems are usually dealt with offline.

“We’ve been swimming each other since we were, like, 8 years old,” Dix said. “Everyone in the PAC-10, we pretty much know all of them. It’s definitely competitive, but if we want to talk about something, we talk about it before the meet. It’s a respect thing.”

“We’ve had people trash talk or rub it in when we don’t win,” Brubaker said. “That just happened this year with the team we lost to in our last playoff game and it happened last year with how we chose to handle our game with Phoenixville when we had a playoff game versus Pennridge in the days following.”

“We’ve had some issues,” DeRenzo said. “I think every school has issues.”

DeRenzo said he talks to his student-athletes about the responsibility of social media usage. A specific story he tells them is about a coach who went for another job and eventually didn’t get it after the interviewer found a Facebook picture of her in college holding a beer.

“I don’t want to be naïve. Kids are going to take risks and they’re going to do things, and they don’t think they’ll get caught,” DeRenzo said. “Is it an epidemic problem? No. Is it something we have to take a look at? Yeah.”

Brubaker tries to let his players know that tweeting is open to the public and doesn’t completely fade.

“I think the biggest concern, as a coach, is that the players are using it properly,” Brubaker said. “We’ve had some situations where others took issue with what our players were tweeting. We try to emphasize to our players that everyone can see what they are ‘saying’ and it’s important to keep it above the board.”

“I talk to them to make sure they make sure that they understand that that just doesn’t go away,” DeRenzo said. “Electronic data is the same as just paper data in the ability to extract it. If something is negative, it can come back to haunt you.”

Although Brubaker does browse his players’ tweets occasionally and talks to them about social media, especially before big games, he said he has no desire to be a “Twitter cop.”

“If a person doesn’t speak civilly or doesn’t have the integrity to sign his or her name, then it doesn’t hold a lot of substance,” Brubaker said. “Being outside of our program, they have a fraction of the information that we have and have different goals and interests than we have. It’s easy to stand on a perceived hill and throw stones.”

DeRenzo uses the term “CC,” repurposed from “carbon copy” to a digital age term — “coward communicator.”

“With social media, you’re talking from afar and no one is around,” DeRenzo said. “It’s real easy to hit that send button.”

“I think people forget that students used to write notes in school that were less than appropriate,” Brubaker said. “The difference is that many of these social media avenues are open to the public. That hasn’t completely sunk in with some students.”

All the same, Shimkonis said she doesn’t feel spotlighted by having a Twitter account as an athlete.

“I have never been involved in a Twitter fight over sports,” she said.

Social media have opened up the ability of many more than in the past to have a voice heard by the masses. In cases like student section Twitter accounts, that can be good.

Credibility is paramount

“The ability to almost instantly get the info out is nice, but a lot of times it is cancelled out by the lack of thorough reporting, rumor-mongering, et cetera,” Grumling said. “I also have a problem with the lack of accountability aspect, like most folks who chirp on Twitter won’t say the same thing to someone’s face.”

“I’m a big believer in accuracy,” DeRenzo said. “I think that sometimes, in haste, we make some mistakes that are basically avoidable and preventable.”

Social media’s increasing presence in high school sports makes certain aspects of coverage better than ever, but the challenges facing the rest of journalism still have to be taken into account.

“Is (the digital coverage) sustainable? It seems that a person’s ability to take on more is ever-increasing,” Hertzog said. “Whenever you think you’ve hit your ceiling, you likely haven’t. But it would be foolish to think that something doesn’t suffer with staffs stretched too thin…the requirements of what it means to be relevant media have been reinvented in the last five years. The structure of an editorial staff and a reporter’s role needs to be reinvented to match.”

In the meantime, reporters, athletes, coaches, parents and everyone in between will have to grow together figuring out the new immediacy of high school coverage and, more importantly, enjoying it.

“Former players are saying, ‘This is great,’” Grubbs said. “’I really wish we had this when we were in school.’”

About the Author

Frank Otto is a general assignment reporter covering Phoenixville, Limerick and Spring-Ford schools in addition to features and spot news. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Otto moonlights with the sports department on occasion. Reach the author at fotto@pottsmerc.com
or follow Frank on Twitter: @fottojourno.